books, including Lead the Work,
describes the future workforce as
being “boundary-less,” and looking
more like an ecosystem than a talent
pool. In this type of environment,
business-unit leaders have workers
from a wide range of disciplines at
their disposal, and workers have
frequent opportunities to broaden their
professional scope.

To illustrate his point, Boudreau
points to IBM Corp.’s internal
marketplace, through which managers
seek out more junior employees
from throughout the organization
to contribute to specific projects or
complete particular tasks within the
manager’s function.

“It’s a platform where workers can
go and volunteer to help out another
unit, which obviously helps get a job
done,” says Boudreau.

“And employees like it because
it gives them a chance to grow and
develop, and to hone skills in areas that
they’re interested in; skills that they
don’t necessarily get to use in their
day-to-day jobs.”

Automation’s Impact

It would be tough to overstate therole that technology plays in connectingthese managers and workers, andhelping them collaborate throughoutthe course of a given project.

Some employers have begun
to express concerns about how
some technological advances—
automation and artificial intelligence,
in particular—will affect their
organizations in the future.

Seyfarth Shaw’s recent Future of
Work Outlook Survey, for example,
surveyed a pool of 717 business
leaders that included vice presidents,
directors and managers of HR. The
Chicago-headquartered law firm found
72 percent of respondents saying that
automation and artificial intelligence
will force their organizations to
reshape the size and makeup of their
workforce in the next five years.

Laura Maechtlen, a San Francisco-based partner at Seyfarth Shaw, sees
“a lot of ‘Chicken Little’-type thinking”
with respect to automation’s impact on
the future of work.

“There’s just so much fear
about people being replaced,” says
Maechtlen, who is also national
vice chair of the firm’s labor and
employment department, and co-chair of Seyfarth Shaw’s diversity and
inclusion action team.

That fear, she says, isn’t well-founded.

Automation should be seen as an
opportunity to free up employees, not
to replace them, says Maechtlen.

For HR leaders, the key will be todetermine “the ways in which we canapproach the work that we have to getdone with a different toolkit to get thatwork done.”For instance, “you can have robotsdo some of the work on the assemblyfloor in order to get cars built, put ona sales floor and sold. Automation isreally about making processes moreefficient. But the decision-making—how to market the car, what features toinclude—remains in the hands of yourtalent.”Indeed, many processes can besuccessfully automated, and morecompanies will soon look to AIand automation to augment theorganization’s talent.

In HR, for example,“there’s a huge opportunity toautomate a lot of transactionsDussert, vice president ofhuman capital managementtransformation at RedwoodShores, Calif.-based Oracle Corp.

(see sidebar).

Take HR service centers, for
instance.

“This is an estimate, but figure thatroughly one-third of questions to HRservice centers are about pay,” saysDussert. “It’s a basic request. There’san opportunity for HR to look at thetype of queries it’s most commonlygetting, and maybe look at automatingresponses to frequently askedquestions. That’s a simple thing, but itallows you to then retrain and redeploythe people answering those questionsto handle actual HR work and provideArtificial intelligence has alreadyproven its value in assisting withcertain “traditional” HR tasks, such aspredicting attrition, notes Boudreau.

“As we look ahead,” he says, “whatwe should be talking about is theapplication of AI to reconstruct andredistribute work throughout theorganization, and determining how thetechnology will fit within the company.”CHROs, says Boudreau, can andshould be instrumental in this effort.

“HR can create the space where
we can have these discussions, and
talk about how to integrate automation
or artificial intelligence into your
organization and with the talent you
have,” he says. “For that matter,
HR can start discussions around
finding alternatives for those workers
who actually could be displaced by
technology, and helping those people
find new skills and opportunities.

“I think having those
conversations,” says Boudreau, “would
pay off enormously for all involved.”

Send questions or comments about
this story to hreletters@lrp.com.

Automation Comes to HR

Recent CareerBuilder research suggests that while the pace of automation in HR might be slower than in other departments, it’s still on its way. In a recent survey of 719 HR managers and recruiters, the Chicago-based CareerBuilder found companies turning to technology to address time-consuming and labor-intensive talent-acquisition and management tasks that
are susceptible to human error. Among employers saying that they automate at
least one part of talent acquisition and management, 57 percent said they are
automating employee messaging, with 53 percent and 47 percent saying the
same about employee benefits and payroll, respectively. In addition, 47 percent
indicated that their organizations have automated
background screening and drug testing.

All that said, there’s still plenty of room
for humans in human resources. The
same survey sees a “significant
proportion” of firms still relying on
manual processes. For example,
34 percent of respondents
said their companies don’t
use automation to recruit
candidates, while 44 percent
don’t automate onboarding
and 60 percent said they
don’t automate human capital
management activities for
employees.

“Automating human resources
allows you to free up your HR
workers. This doesn’t mean that
you won’t need them anymore,”
says Rosemary Haefner, chief human
resources officer at CareerBuilder. “For
example, instead of having to spend hours
keying in payroll information, a few simple steps are all
they will have to [take] to complete the payroll process.

thinks most companies will get the
message, and will start to reconsider
the way they build their talent base. If
they haven’t already, that is.

“I think that even the idea of acompany as we think of it today isgoing to shift pretty quickly,” he says.“You won’t need a specific group ofpeople to collaborate anymore,” saysLink. “You only need a consortium ofpeople. You don’t have to pay them full-time wages. You actually contract withthem to do a specific task, and that’s it.”Today, an organization is generallyviewed as “a group of people alignedto produce a product or an outcome,”says Link.

He predicts that in 10 years “the
digitalization of our world, and in
particular the workforce, will be
complete.

“Everything we consume will bepersonalized—products, marketing,media—and data-driven, as acceleratedby the pressures of globalization andtechnological innovations.”This shift, says Link, will onlyfurther affect how and when workerswant to work, “as they choose agilearrangements or alternative careerpaths.”The challenge for employers andtalent-management professionalswill be to “adapt new methods forattracting, retaining and managingtheir workforce,” he adds.

“Emerging technologies and
developments such as virtual
collaboration will be the norm,”
and won’t require specific effort to
accommodate workers seeking work
as freelancers or other “nontraditional”
work arrangements, he says.

Attracting this type of contributor
was what Stem founder and managing
partner Gregg Fisher had in mind when
he launched the company in 2013.

“Instead of having exclusively full-time, W- 2 employees who report to
a specific physical office, we’ve built
a much more fluid, dynamic team of
consultants in the U.S. and Europe,”
says Fisher. “That gives us the ability
to curate talent from a growing
network and to assemble independent
consultants into virtual teams to deliver
whatever the client might need.

“And when we say ‘independent,’there’s a spectrum of independentconsultants ranging from freelancersgoing from gig to gig to a trueindependent consultant who has [his orher] own brand and is marketing himor herself as an individual,” he says, “toform what we think of here as a sort ofmicro-consultancy.”John Boudreau, professor ofmanagement and organization at theUSC Marshall School of Business,foresees more companies—even thosethat will still rely primarily on full-time,office-based employees—adopting asimilar mind-set toward how work isassigned, and how it gets done.